When you read this, I’ll probably be sitting at Liszt Ferenc International Airport. There is no point in coming after me. You won’t be let through security like in Hollywood movies and anyway, nobody turns back from an airport after having paid for the expensive plane ticket. Anyway, I’m at the airport, most probably drinking pálinka, because we, Hungarians are like this, we make merry weeping.

I wanted to write a much more touching introduction, but I don’t seem to be very good in farewell letters. Maybe because it’s not that. In my last month in London I was depressing in advance about leaving the city. As expected, my dad jumped on me saying: “Why, won’t you be sad when you leave Hungary?” Of course, I will. But the two feelings are completely different. My year in London was like finding an old summer love again and still a few more months together from life. Before that I’d always cried when I saw London on telly. Now I smile. Our affair is over.

Budapest and Hungary are different. I am sad, yes, how could I not be? For this is my homeland, this small country in the embrace of flames, the world of my faraway childhood. Here, I know where the people go and I know what the crimson pain, dripping from the house walls might mean in the summer dusk* And I am not sad. Because I know that I don’t go far and because I know I can come back anytime. I will never stop loving Budapest, the same way you can never forget your first love. I will never stop similarly as you don’t cease to love your parents when you get married. That’s why I’m not sad because, however big cliché it is, it is not a good bye but a see you later. I know I can return if needs be. But now I have to go because life is taking me away.

They say home is where your heart is. My heart is in my chest between my lungs and not buried in the ground somewhere. I bear my home in my heart, so I can’t lose it and I believe that it’s in a safer place in the cage of my ribs than in a Europe torn by conflicts.

I can’t say anything else, my life will be like this from now on, a momentary peace between farewells.

*This is a quotation from one of my favourite Hungarian poets, Miklós Radnóti. We have a special connection because it was after his wife, Fanni Gyarmati, that my mother chose to name me. I bear the name of a muse J This translation is mine, but you can read the whole thing here.